The Bible

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The Bible
Introduction
This is a huge topic, one people have been wrestling with at least since the
Enlightenment of the 17th Century, even from the beginning of Christianity itself.
There is no way in which we could possibly address this with any sort of
thoroughness in an evening – it is a study for a lifetime, and I hope that some of us
will use this opportunity to begin to engage in it more thoroughly.
All I can hope to do tonight is to suggest a few ideas, point out a few problems,
outline a few possible lines for future thought.
Most of what I say tonight is taken from Migliore’s introduction to Theology – Faith
Seeking Understanding, which is worth reading. The other book I have consulted is
N.T. Wright The Last Word, which I also recommend.
A Note on “Authority”
The term “Authority” is a problematic one in our society. It is generally used in
sentences like “arbitrary authority”, and contrasted with Reason. Authority is seen as
something which closes down, infantilises, squashes debate where Reason opens us
up to truth, and is adult and responsible.
I’m not really going to talk about Authority in the abstract tonight. It’s too loaded, too
difficult a term. Let’s just use it as a short way for saying “trustworthy” for the time
being, pending some further discussion on what it might mean to say that the Bible (or
anything else) might be authoritative.
Knowledge and Truth
What is Knowledge?
Is the only possible sort of knowledge the scientific sort? Or are there other sorts of
knowledge? In this section we will look at the way the knowledge debate has been
conducted in our society, and question whether scientific truth is the only possible sort
of truth.
The general history of thought in the West over the last two and a half thousand years
– ever since Socrates started to ask “no, what does that really mean?” philosophy in
has wrestled with the question of knowledge. What is it, exactly? How do you know
anything? And how do you know that you know it?
This is known to the trade as Epistemology, and there is a (highly contested, but
useful) definition of knowledge which is: Knowledge is justified true belief.
That is to say, if you believe something to be the case, and it is in fact the case, and
you have good reasons for believing it, then it counts as knowledge.
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Since the Enlightenment, the question of how one uncovers truth has more or less
focussed in on the scientific method. If you can justify your beliefs “scientifically”,
then it counts as justified, and you are seen to have reasonable grounds for believing it.
On the other hand, the further you get from a scientific justification, the further you
are from truth.
Another way of characterising this tendency is to contrast “subjective” and
“objective” knowledge. If knowledge is in the public sphere, if it is publicly verifiable,
then it has some chance of being “objective.” On the other hand, if it is not publicly
verifiable, then it is “subjective”, where “subjective” is more about one’s feelings,
one’s internal state, which is not a place for dealing with truth or falsity.
A good example of this is the concept of Beauty. The phrase “Beauty is in the eye of
the beholder” seems like a truism to us, but other societies have held that beauty is an
objective quality, like mass, which is capable of being precisely measured. But in our
society, beauty, it is held, is subjective – it is an internal response to purely private
cues, and, that being the case, there can be no such thing as a “really existing” beauty
– so Bach and Madonna, Michelangelo and Damien Hirst – are as good as one another.
Whatever floats your boat, as the saying goes.
This can be contrasted with the truths of science: When science says that the atomic
number of Hydrogen is 1, or that the acceleration due to gravity on Earth is 9 metres
per second per second, that is objective truth. And objective truth is a lot truthier than
subjective truth.
While I am not in any way decrying the achievements of the Enlightenment (imagine
living without modern plumbing and general anaesthetic, let alone the internet), there
is an effect on how we perceive truth which you can see in the “liberal” vs
“conservative” debates around the “truth” of the Bible.
I will revisit this later, but the basic parameters of the argument are that if the Bible is
true, then it is (all) as true as, and in the same way as, scientific truth. So that if
Genesis appears to contradict science, that would imply that it is not a scientifically
adequate document, and thus not true in the only way which matters. So either
Genesis is completely untrue, or science is incorrect.
However, I would argue that, important as scientific truth is, it is not the only sort of
truth that there is, and to defend the Bible on the grounds of its scientific truth is to
ask questions of it which the original writers had no idea of. It is, to say the least an
inadequate way of looking at things.
The Question of Genre
To anyone who has ever read much of the Bible, it becomes clear quickly that it
contains a lot of things. The term “Scriptures” (note the plural) used to be the more
common way of describing it, and I think we have lost a lot by slipping into the
singular. It is a lot of different writings, in a lot of different genres.
This is important when considering the “truth” of the Bible. It is not good enough to
deal with it as one homogenous thing, so that if any one part of it fails to meet your
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particular favourite test for truth you can point at it and say “there, it is false” and
think that you have done anything more than throw missile words about.
The story contains myths, proverbs, stories with no real pretence to be factual (Job,
the parables of Jesus), reportage, history, songs, and a famous love poem among other
things.
Is Job “true”, for instance? If by that you mean “Was there a person called Job who
God allowed to be tested by Satan, but who remained faithful and was then answered
by – and compensated by – God?”, then the answer would have to be “no”. But if you
mean “are there truths in Job”, then, yes, it is packed full of truths about how to live –
and how not to, and a theological reflection on why there is suffering for good people,
among other things.
It all depends what you mean by “true”. What sort of thing is the particular book of
the Bible which you are looking at? What would it mean for it to be “true”? If you are
asking scientific questions about books of poetry, then you are not going to get very
satisfactory answers.
Models for Reading the Bible
Four Inadequate Ways of Reading The Bible
This section adapted from Migliore, with a few notes of my own.
1 - Supernatural Origins
The view which we might loosely characterise as “biblicist”, which holds that the
Bible is literally true – that is to say, that it contains (only?) truths of an (in principle)
scientifically verifiable nature. So, if the Bible says that the world was created in 7
days, then that is literally what happened. Obviously some of the events which took
place can have had no human observers – the creation, Satan talking to God about Job,
that sort of thing.
But why are we to trust what the Bible says? What makes it “authoritative”?
“…the Bible is authoritative by virtue of its supernatural origins… One theory
of inspiration … is that God dictated the words of Scripture to the biblical
writers, who acted as secretaries.”1
That is, since God dictated it, none of it can be doubted. To doubt one bit, is to doubt
it all.
Angel Points
• It is conceptually simple
• It presents itself as the historical orthodoxy
Devil Points
• Why so many inconsistencies, internal contradictions?
1
Migliore pp 47
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• Migliore notes problems with this approach (besides the obvious one of: if
God wrote the Bible Himself, then why do it with so many seeming
contradictions?)
(1) The doctrine of inspiration becomes defence of certain theories of the miraculous
origins of the Bible. “Missing in this interpretation of inspiration is an awareness that
the Word of God is not directly accessible to us, not a possession under our control….
The Word of God is an act of God in which the God who has spoken speaks here and
now… the same Spirit of God… must again be active in the preaching and hearing of
their witnesses if what is spoken and heard is to be received as the Word of God.” 2
(2) Requires infallibility in scripture “The defense of the Christian faith thus becomes
the defense of the doctrine of infallibility.”3 So, if you can prove that any claims in
the Bible (say the 7 day creation) are not in fact true, you have disproved the
infallibility of the Bible – and hence of Christianity.
(3) Tends to flatten all distinctions within the Bible.
“..the Bible is taken as authority … simply because its words are identified
without qualification with God’s words. One result of this identification is that
biblical texts are levelled in importance. When this happens, the account of the
command of God to utterly destroy the Amalekites….[is] vested with the same
authority as the proclamation that God was in Christ.”4
“In this way Biblicism turns the lifegiving authority of Scripture into a deadening
authoritarianism.”5
2 - Historical Source
A second possibility is reading the Bible as a historical source. The Source
Hypothesis of the Pentateuch is an example of this, as are the innumerable Quests for
the Historical Jesuses. It moves the idea of authority away from the text, to the events
which the text is about.
Angel Points
• There is a real historical context to be found, which can illuminate what is
written, and help us to understand them better. 1st Century Palestine is a very
different place to modern day Australia.
• It can get rid of fanciful readings.
Devil Points
• Moves the focus away from the text back to “what really happened” – as
reconstructed by the scholar. While “what really happened” is important (if
Jesus did not rise, then our hope is in vain), there are problems:
o “What really happened” itself is unrecoverable. All that is accessible is
what the scholar judges to have happened – and if that scholar happens
to believe that the miraculous is impossible, then they will produce a
non-miraculous version of events, based on this a priori assumption.
2
Ibid pp 48
3
Ibid pp 48
4
Ibid pp 48-49
5
Ibid pp 49
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o The text itself is important – it contains the context – the community
making sense of the events. If Jesus was just some guy who was raised
from the dead, and that was all, then it might not mean all that much to
us.
3 - Religious Classic
These days, most people have never read the Bible. In this situation, it is unsurprising
that, in the US at least the Bible is taught as “great (or at least important) literature
and its authority is seen as analogous to that of ‘classics’ in the literary tradition”6
(has anyone come across this in Australia?)
Angel Points
• At least people are reading the Bible. It is an important text for understanding
a lot of other literature and ideas in the West, and people who have never read
it will never really get a lot of what the West is, and how it came to be like it is.
Devil Points
The Bible has to be more than “great literature”. No-one doubts that Jesus rose again
in the gospel story – but whether he rose again in real life is much more contested.
Yahweh is not just an interesting, enigmatic literary figure.
“The believing community approaches the Bible not only as literature, great or
not so great, but as Scripture, as normative witness to the acts o the living Go
for our salvation.”7
4 - Private Devotional Text
Well, we might say, away with all that! The best way to read the Bible is as a letter
written by God to me. All the questions of truth and falsity and the difficulties can be
safely ignored, while I use the book to cultivate my spiritual state. “The Bible speaks
to me and assures me of God’s forgiveness and mercy in Jesus Christ.”8
Angel
• There is an important, personally transformative aspect to Scripture. An
important meaning to it is that Jesus died for you personally. And at least
you’re reading it.
Devil
• This can lead to a very quietistic, individualistic faith, abandoning the public
sphere
• “A reduction of Scripture occurs when it serves only to illumine my own
experience and struggle as a pilgrim of faith. The individualistic interpretation
of Scripture represents a retreat of the church and theology. The public realm
is abandoned in favour of the private real of life, where faith can be secure
from attack.”9
6
Ibid pp 49
7
Ibid pp 50
8
Ibid pp 50
9
Ibid pp 50
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Some Ways Forward
What then is the authority of Scripture? How do we know what to make of it, how to
read it?
Frank Rees, in his Introduction to Theology Course told us to always be asking: what
does this say of God? That should be the key to how we interpret Scripture. How does
our reading of any given passage fit in with our understanding of the God of Jesus
Christ?
The first point is that it is not in the Bible we believe, but in God in Christ, and the
Bible is the witness to Him10. That is possibly a good response to people who say “do
you believe in the Bible?”
Secondly, the Scriptures have to be understood as being in a dialectical relationship
with the community. They are the witness of God’s work, and of the community’s
reflection on it. The authority of Scripture was not originally a doctrine which was
dreamt up and then imposed on a set of otherwise inoffensive texts. Rather, the idea
of its authority comes from the experience of hearing it, and living it. It is a
descriptive term, rather than a proscriptive one.
N.T. Wright points to the narrative nature of the Bible11. We are part of a story which
goes something like this: Exodus-Kingdom-Exile-Return-Jesus-Pentecost (or perhaps
Creation – New Creation). What is appropriate for the first act (what Wright calls the
“foundation charter”) may not be appropriate for the act in which we live. That is how
to value the Old Testament – as interpreted by Christ.
Thus the Bible has to be read both as being “about” Jesus (as the reformers said, it has
to “Show forth Christ”), and also in terms of the big narrative. That is why, as
Christians, we pay less attention to, say, the Leviticus rules than we do to the
institution of the Lord’s Supper.
Wright also argues that a church is a history of interpretations of the Bible. The idea
of a “rule of faith” (of which the Nicene and Apostolic creeds are two good, if later,
examples) grew up at around the same time as the text. This seems to me to be a fairly
important concept. If you doubt the importance of this - if you think that it is possible
to “just read the Bible”, I invite you to go an talk to a Jehovah’s Witness, a Seventh
Day Adventist, or a Mormon.
Anyone who has read The Year of Living Biblically (as recommended by Brooke)
knows, no-one actually does take the Bible absolutely literally anyway, no matter how
vociferously they protest. Everyone brings their own readings of the Bible to bear –
their own “canon within the canon”. It is simply that not everyone is sufficiently
aware of their own presuppositions (from which ever of the wings one argues from.)
I want to challenge the assertion of some churches that they (only?) “take the Bible
seriously.” I would want to argue that to take it “literally”, in the Biblicist sense of the
10
Ibid pp 50-51
11
See especially
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word, is not to take it seriously at all: rather, it is to try to cram it into a conceptual
framework which did not exist when it was written. To take it seriously is to wrestle
with it, and to take it as it was originally written, with due respect to the different
context.
To take the Bible seriously is to accept the flawed, idiosyncratic writers. Incarnational
means taken flesh, and the Bible is just that. “The various literary forms of the biblical
witness are irreducible media of revelation and mutually complement and correct each
other. … The scriptural witness is extraordinarily rich and diverse.”12 This is a good
thing.
The authority of scripture should be a lived thing. I asked Andy Hamilton, a Jesuit
lecturer at UFT if he had one thing he could say about the Bible in this sort of context.
He told me to enjoy it, let your imagination go in it, rather than worry about proving
or disproving it. Live your way into the stories.
Migliore’s Principles for Interpreting Scripture13
In Faith Seeking Understanding Migliore suggests four guidelines for Biblical
interpretation.
1 – Scripture should be interpreted with historical and literary sensitivity; yet
Scripture’s unique witness to the living God resists its imprisonment in the past or its
reduction to pious fiction:
• Historical criticism of the Bible is important – uncovering the context of
God’s actions, respecting the particularity of events, and that the narrative
refers to things outside the text.
• Reminds us that the biblical writers were fallible human beings. The grace of
God does not destroy human freedom but renews and empowers it.
• It needs to be read with an eye to its future unfolding – “we should not be
surprised that the full meaning of the new freedom in Christ was not perfectly
comprehended and actualized in the early church”14 – e.g. some of Paul’s
statements about women.
• “In the dynamic interpretative process within Scripture, there are “layers and
layers of fresh reading” in new circumstances and old teachings are sometimes
seen to be problematic.”15
2 –Scripture must be interpreted Theocentrically; however the identity of God is
radically redescribed in the overarching narrative of Scripture as the triune God”
• The central actor in Scriptures is God. The content of the Biblical stories is
God’s action in judgement and mercy on Israel and in the history of Jesus.
• “…all of the strands of the witness of Scripture to the identity and purpose of
God converge in Jesus Christ”16
12
Migliore pp 51
13
Migliore pp 53
14
Ibid pp 55
15
Ibid
16
Ibid pp 57
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3 – Scripture must be interpreted ecclesially; that is, in the context of the life and
witness of the church; however an ecclesial reading of cSripture differes not only
from an individualistic reading but also from the control of Scriptures by church
doctrine or hierarchy.
• “The church is a community of interpretation and it has certain rules of sound
understanding of its sacred texts. These rules are not arbitrary. They are rooted
in Scripture itself.”17
4 – Scripture must be interpreted contextually; however, the context of our
interpretation must not be confined to our personal history or to that of our
immediate locality
• We need to listen to the voices of the poor and marginalised.
• “The hermeneutic privilege of the poor” is that the experience o fsuffering and
povery provides an opportunity for understanding the message of the Bible
that frequently remains hidden to those who insulate themselves from the
suffering of others and their own suffering.18
17
Ibid pp 59
18
Ibid pp 62
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